Last night when I turned on the radio around 3am, I was surprised to hear Larry Bensky being interviewed on WABC, the am talk radio station. He was reporting on the arrests of Dennis Bernstein, a KPFA programmer and his supporters out in San Francisco this week and continuing protests. This is a tidewater event for the American left.

KPFA is one of five FM radio stations that are part of the Pacifica radio network, founded by pacifist and anarchists shortly after WWII. A bitter struggle has been unfolding over the past 5 years over the future of the network. The national board wants to make the network more mainstream and liberal, while the local stations want to retain control over programming which includes many radical voices, including Dennis Bernstein's.

The divisions between the board and the local stations map roughly to the divisions that were manifested over the war in Yugoslavia. The board is made up of Clinton supporters, including the chair who is a bureaucrat appointed by Clinton to her current job. The local programmers are the kinds of people who have challenged the Clinton agenda for the entire time he has been in office, including his war in the Balkans.

Before trying to clarify the underlying political issues, I want to relate some personal encounters about the network that for much of my adult life has been as centrally defining as the Internet is today. When I was a high-school student in upstate NY during the late 50s and early 60s, I was a classical music and hi-fi nut. In order to take advantage of NYC's FM classical stations, I set up a powerful antenna in our backyard. WBAI, NYC's Pacifica station, introduced me to some of the most incredible programming I ever could have imagined. Gunther Schuller was the host of a 60 part series on the evolution of classical music in the 20th century. I can remember almost like it was yesterday Schuller explaining how the shifting harmonies of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun influenced Schoenberg. He would play a moment or two of the Debussy side by side with some of Schoenberg's 12 tone music and explain their kinship. Another memorable show was hosted by composer Henry Cowell, who surveyed folk music of the world from the Roma people to China. Cowell was a left-wing composer who was part of the broad popular front of the 1930s and 40s. His interest in folk music, which was reflected in his own great compositions, reflected the same kind of internationalism found in Paul Robeson.

After moving to NYC in 1965, shortly after graduating college, I began listening to WBAI in order to get uncensored news about the war in Vietnam. Their reporter Chris Koch was based in Vietnam and exposed administration lies on a daily basis. It helped me to turn definitively against the war, which led to my radicalization. WBAI was also a home to the counter-culture, as late night host Bob Fass frequently played host to the Bob Dylan, Abby Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. The station also fostered the development of free form radio in which a host literally improvised for several hours about personal neuroses and enthusiasms. Free form radio, first developed at WBAI, became a powerful influence on the next generation of commercial broadcasters like shock jock Howard Stern, who listened to the station while growing up in Long Island. Free form radio has also been a big influence on the way I use this medium, the Internet itself.

After joining the Trotskyist movement, I lost track of WBAI. In the various cities I traveled to on behalf of the SWP, there was only one that had a Pacifica station. That was in Houston, Texas where Pacifica radio and the SWP were two of the main targets of the Ku Klux Klan. Our bookstore had been destroyed by a pipe bomb a few months before I had arrived in late 1973. Meanwhile the Pacifica station's transmitter had been dynamited twice.

After leaving the Trotskyist movement, I returned to NYC and made WBAI an important part of my life. During the decade of the 1980s, I was deeply involved with Central America solidarity and the station was literally part of the movement. I became friends with fellow CISPES activist Will K. Wilkins, who hosted a morning show. Will was also a big fan of world music, which WBAI scheduled frequently. I also listened to the last generation of free form radio personalities, like Larry Josephson. Josephson was a neo-conservative crank who hated the leftists who dominated WBAI's programming. Like many 60s liberals, Josephson had shifted to the right. The only thing that made him interesting was his confessional approach, which was a combination of Woody Allen's self-deprecating shtick and bitter tirades against the women who had dumped him. Anybody who listened to him for a few moments would understand why he was so lonely. He was an amusing but creepy person.

In the 1990s, program director Samori Marksman, a black Caribbean Marxist and no-nonsense sort of guy, purged the station of such personalities. The station became even more left-wing and more earnest. As somebody with a taste for the neurotically offbeat, I found myself listening to the station less and less, especially since the Internet has become my main form of entertainment. Why listen to WBAI when I can read elegant and ironic prose from Argentinian Marxists in English or Spanish?

However, the recent battles at Pacifica have really captured my attention. Basically the national board wants to transform the network into another version of NPR, the liberal public radio network that has been criticized by media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) for its pro-State Department coverage of the Gulf War and the recent war in Yugoslavia. A warning sign of what might be in the offing is Mark Cooper's proposal that the station function more "like the Guardian". Cooper, a Nation Magazine journalist and host of a Pacifica show himself, views the old guard at the station as out of touch. If being in touch means pushing Nato's war like the Guardian, then one might as well call in the Ku Klux Klan to blow up all the transmitters right now.

It is difficult to understand exactly where the current board is going, since they operate in secrecy. As chairperson, Mary Frances Berry has proven to be as unpopular as Pat Scott whom she replaced. Both of these women are African-Americans with a lengthy history of involvement with the Democratic Party. Another key board person was Jack O'Dell, who was a veteran CP'er and trusted aide to both Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson. Another African-American, William Lucy, National Secretary-Treasurer of AFSCME, sits on the board and has deep ties to this milieu. He was a key figure in the civil rights and peace movement. June Makela is another board member who I am familiar with. She was head of the Funding Exchange in the 1980s, a liberal donor of causes like Tecnica, the group I worked with. I wrote her an email complaining about the direction the board was going and received a canned response that the board's critics were racist and sexist.

Basically the board represents the institutions that have ties to the left-wing of the ruling class. The foundations that they are connected to have been adapting themselves to the Clinton agenda for a number of years now. While giving lip-service to the idea of changing society, they mostly have acted as loyalists who urge a less severe attack on the poor and the working class. The black middle-class and the labor movement have been in the forefront of defending Clinton and it is no surprise that people like Berry, Lucy and O'Dell would find the cranky, hard-left edge of much of Pacifica's programming to be "out of touch" as Mark Cooper puts it.

Station founder Lew Hill described his philosophy in a 1951 statement which can be found at the extremely useful "Free Pacifica" website, which is part of "Radio For All" (http://www.radio4all.org). Defending the need for listener sponsorship, Hill explained its political importance:

"The fact that the subscription is voluntary merely enlarges the same point. We make a considerable step forward, it seems to me, when we use a system of broadcasting which promises that the mediocre will not survive. But the significance of what does survive increases in ways of the profoundest import to our times when it proceeds from voluntary action. Anyone can listen to a listener sponsored station. Anyone can understand the rationale of listener sponsorship---that unless the station is supported by those who value it, no one can listen to it, including those who value it.. This is common sense. But beyond this, actually sending in the subscription, which one does not have to send in unless one particularly wants to, implies the kind of cultural engagement, as some French philosophers call it, that is surely indispensable for the sake of the whole culture."

When all of America seems consumed by greed and self-improvement, the mission of Pacifica seems more worthwhile than ever. When you think about Hill's rationale, it is closely related to the idea of socialism which is based on the free association of producers. In essence, the attack on the Pacifica stations is an attack on socialism.